"The Merv Griffin Show, 1962-1986" (MPI Home Video). Even for many of us who remember the genuine article, the image of talk show host Merv Griffin is inextricably mixed up with the impression Rick Moranis unleashed on "SCTV": "Oooo, we'llberightback."...

Steven Sotloff ventured off to dangerous lands to bear witness.
This is what journalists do.
We go places — sometimes safe and glamorous, sometimes wretched and disturbing — to watch, listen, report. We tell the stories of others. We try...

James Foley and Steven Sotloff, the two journalists recently beheaded on video by members of the militant group Islamic State, had a number of things in common. They both cared deeply about the Middle East and believed that stories from the region...

Six months in, there is more to say about Al Jazeera America than that its ratings stink. But that's about the only thing I see written about the Qatar-owned cable channel these days.
The ratings are minuscule — about one-half the audience that Al...

advertisement

RELATED TOPICS

With its unblinking focus on young American soldiers sent to fight a seemingly inexhaustible enemy on its home turf, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's "Restrepo" was one of the more gripping war documentaries to emerge in recent years, and one of a relative few to bring much-needed attention to the conflict in Afghanistan. Returning to the extraordinary footage he shot with Hetherington, who was killed while covering Libya in 2011, Junger has emerged with a worthy companion piece in "Korengal," a...

*** (out of four)
A movie can never make you fully understand a first-person experience, whether you’re watching war footage or a graphic sex scene. Note: These rarely occur in the same film.
However, the Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary “Restrepo” did an awfully good job of giving viewers rare, intimate access to real-life conflict. Embedded with American soldiers deployed to Afghanistan’s ultra-dangerous Korengal Valley in 2007, directors and veteran journalists Tim...

With the 2010 film "Restrepo," war documentarians Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington brought a searing immediacy to the Afghanistan conflict, relaying the day-to-day of soldiers deployed on a brutal, exposed, rocky outpost known for incessant firefighting with the Taliban.
Now comes "Korengal," a new assemblage from Junger of the material he and Hetherington gathered from their time with the men of Battle Company. (The title refers to the six-mile-long "valley of death" where the soldiers...

Tim Hetherington Photos

The last weekend of March offered up a bunch of TV events, but you ain't seen nothing yet. April 2013 brings showers of season and series premieres, finales and films to add to the already launched new seasons of "Game of Thrones," Doctor Who" and others.
"Warehouse 13" comes back to Syfy, while the network debuts its long-in-the-works "Defiance." Starz' "Spartacus" says good-bye just in time for the exciting new series "Da Vinci's Demons." "The Borgias" on Showtime and "Veep" on HBO begin news seasons....

"The Island President" (PBS, Monday, 10 p.m.). Comprising 2,000 pancake-flat islands in the Indian Ocean, with a mean elevation of about five feet above sea level, the Maldives will be the first nation to go, literally, when the oceans rise. Jon Shenk's documentary follows then-president Mohamed Nasheed on a mission to save his country, his people and maybe the world. A frequently jailed activist who once spent 18 months in solitary confinement in a corrugated iron shed, Nasheed hits the road to make...

For director of photography Tobias Schliessler, shooting the gritty war drama "Lone Survivor" brought plenty of complex challenges, including pulling off treacherous stunts, dealing with rugged terrain and orchestrating as many as five cameras at once.
But at least one thing was simple, Schliessler said in a recent phone interview: the decision to capture the action with an unflinching eye.
"It was quite easy because it's a true story," Schliessler said of the film, which is based on former Navy...